


in my next iteration, you might say

by Raptor_Dash



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies), Jurassic Park - All Media Types, Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 17:09:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12964296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raptor_Dash/pseuds/Raptor_Dash
Summary: "Here I am, talking about dinosaurs again."





	in my next iteration, you might say

**Author's Note:**

> Three reasons Ian Malcolm might've come to speak on behalf of the dinosaurs of Jurassic World.

I.

The sun sets gently over Ian’s home in Santa Fe. The sky is a deep orange and the grass is long, and the little feet of his children leave trampled footprints in the grass as they run and tumble, grasping at each other’s shirts and belt loops in something that resembles a game of tag, snatching at mosquitoes and falling on their backs with breathless laugher. Ian sits on his porch and ignores the mathematics journal in his lap, watching his daughter and two sons enjoy the summer evening. These children didn’t choose to be placed on this earth; they were deliberately brought here through an act of creation, and though this world may not be the best place for them, they deserve to have a place in it. They could clone more dinosaurs just like he could always have more kids, but he’d never be able to have an exact copy of Anna or Xavier or Thomas. Ian watches the two boys chasing each other in circles and Anna lying in wait to pounce one of them to the ground, and he thinks of baby velociraptor siblings playfully nipping at each other as the same sun above him sets above an island off of Costa Rica. He imagines the mother rex watching her hatchling learn to hunt. Families making their way in the world they’ve been given, just like his.

A few days later, Ian remembers that evening as he testifies to the ethics committee. He doesn’t talk about the cooing of baby Pteranodons in their nest, or how his daughter leaned her head on his shoulder as he carried her to bed. Instead he mentions how life like that on Isla Nublar, resilient and persistent as it is, can be as delicate as the shell of an egg.

II.

Ian is alone again. The cycle of ex-Mrs.-Malcolms continues, but the gaps between women grow longer and longer. He’s still respected, of course—he’s more than earned that. People come to his classes and dutifully sit and listen, and his colleagues at the University of Texas invite him to all of their cocktail parties and laugh at all of his jokes. He flies out to Utah at his leisure to visit Kelly at her dig sites, and whenever Elizabeth and her husband invite him to stay the weekend. Afterwards he always goes back to his apartment, and nobody’s there to say hello when he does. No more red ponytails swishing around the kitchen, no more little hands and feet practicing backflips off the coffee table, no more voices asking Dad to read them a bedtime story. Occasionally he’s greeted by a cat’s meow, during the particularly lonely times when he feels like adopting one.

At night he glances over at the shelves full of his books and publications, thinking about how little they’ll mean after he’s gone. Paper is so easily destroyed and thoughts are so easily rejected; a treatise about nonlinear systems won’t leave scars on the earth or make it any greener. He thinks about how evolution has no direction and how life is a crystal with fractals smaller than anyone was ever meant to comprehend. He thinks about the Malcolm effect, a dangerously curved red line within a looping strange attractor. Once things have been hurtled past the point of no return, they’re bound to happen once we decide we’ll let them or not. He couldn’t stop the dinosaurs from reclaiming their planet back then, and he can’t now, so he may as well let them be his legacy. They’ll change the world for the better or the worse, but whatever they do will make sure that his name and his words are repeated as long as dinosaurs walk the planet.

“These creatures were here before us,” he says later, to a room of people listening with silent respect. “If we’re not careful, they’re gonna be here after.”

III.

Things have quieted down. Reporters haven’t darkened Ian’s doorstep for eleven years, ever since he adopted the policy of answering questions about Jurassic World by raising a certain finger. Talk shows and book deals about the San Diego Incident made him enough money to get a nice two-bedroom house in Santa Monica near the boardwalk, and somehow he managed to convince Sarah to live in it with him. His students know by now that asking him about dinosaurs won’t get them anything more informative than a sigh, and a few years ago they stopped asking. He buys Alan Grant a couple of drinks every few months, and they banter about theories until the bartender very respectfully asks them to go yell about the Great Dying somewhere else. Kelly, about to finish grad school on his dime, is making a nice place for herself in the world as well. Ian has talked and thought through a lot of things over the years, and he doesn’t flinch anymore when he sees dinosaur documentaries while flipping through channels.

Someone from the Board of Ethics Regarding Genetically Engineered Organisms sends him a carefully-worded email one day, and for the hell of it, Ian takes them up on their request. He’s seen the videos of the tyrannosaur on Nublar, and when he saw its bared teeth and the aged white scars that line its face, he found that his fear was replaced with respect. The circumstances that brought dinosaurs back onto this earth were still wholly unethical, but the little bastards have been surviving on the island on their own for three years now, and they deserve some credit for that. Will they even manage to outlast human civilization, adapting to this new era and fighting their way forward like they did through the whole Mesozoic? Hell, if Ian has learned anything from the past 25 years of his life, it’s that anything is possible.

So he puts on a suit and he heads to their little board meeting, and he sits in front of his microphone and he tells these bunch of straight-faced guys in monkey suits about how much he’s seen during his time on both islands, about how these animals overcame the limits of what should’ve been possible and bred when their entire population was female. About how everything living on Sorna should’ve croaked when they stopped getting their lysine, but instead they formed a food chain that kept all of the different types of dinosaurs alive despite the inherent limits written into their DNA. About how, no matter how many regulations people have placed on dinosaurs, they’ve always managed to live exactly how they want to. People can write as many laws and send as many animal-rights groups to Nublar as they want, but in the end, dinosaurs will keep on living exactly as long as they intend to.

“Life,” he concludes, “finds a way.”


End file.
